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'":'. >:',;:;j- "",0 , Æ Put DUr 1'ôvor.lte sea $bell ivr ide a melot1 qla Þall8nd make a lamp. We skip evetyt b19 e ept e eU for a (9 11 (amp wii\ì burlap sha4t') pre wiredJP paíd UPS. SeM ðS-.t! (plu 6t7o ta U1 ti.J.) to \ìilo Stelner; Rou1e S) SL1rewsbury N.J. 01701,.. ( 1)7.tH-58";L.. Ye.S J :"ajor bank cards opening scenes: in the captivity of our pale-skinned Blackthorne and in his romantic attachment not so much to Lady Mariko as to the idealized and powerful samurai. The book, in fact, was another in the long line of Anglo-American rap- tures over a dark-skinned superrace. Clavell's Japanese were, almost to a man, immensely strong, beautifully conditioned, splendidly cruel, and yet possessed of an instinctive sense of j us- tice and fair play. In the novel, not only were heads lopped from necks at an awesome rate but the blows were always clean, swift, and true. Clearly, there were no feeble wrists or rusty swords in feudal Ja- :-:.:-:.-.-:--:-:..>>>:-: ............ pan. And no bad sports ð.,i,. among the samurai, for not only did the samurai commit seppuku ( suicide) with a frequency that makes one wonder how the Japanese had any population problem at all by the twen- tieth century but they did so each time with unimpeachable dignity, courage, and, of course, that same manual dex- terity. In other words, while the sur- face of the narrative frothe.d along merrily and interminably with the com- ings and goings of Lords Yabu, Tora- naga, Ishido, etc., and their henchmen, the novel's real drive proceeded from Blackthorne's captivity fantasy: the time-honored white man's descent into the fascinating world of spectacular punishment ( one of Blackthorne's crew is boiled alive, by numerous immersions over a space of many pages), bitter hu- miliation (a samurai pees on the stoic Blackthorne's prostrate back), aliena- tion, and isolation, with, at all times, an idealization of his manly captors. This is the old-fashioned Puritan literary dream that powered "Shogun" the novel and accounted for its special hold on readers. What accounts, I think, for the much looser hold of NBC's "Shogun" on its viewers is that the television team chose to blunt or blur the captivity theme when it trans- ferred the novel to the screen. Grant- ed, NBC's "Shogun" has been an enormous success, at least in terms of ratings. It is the most costly television production ever made, and its promo- tional budget was commensurately ex- travagant. NBC even managed to badg- er certain educational associations so that "Shogun" material might be intro- duced into school classrooms-Feudal Japanese Night in Soc. Sci. 102, so to speak. Still, my guess is that NBC's vast, ambitious, and often finely made production somehow missed its tar- get-not in numbers but in effect. Many of the people I spoke with who had watched the series seemed con- fused and vaguely disappointed. Even sympathetic viewers spoke of too many characters and a bewildering narrative. The plot of television's "Shogun" was in fact somewhat less confusing than the novel, but I think it was perceived as a cumbersome chronicle-play by much of its audience for the reason that this quasi-historical superstruc- ture was what mainly re- mained of the novel when it was transferred to the screen. "Shogun" in television terms was more than ever a story of feuding barons- Lord This against Lord That, junior warlord against senior warlord-though who was against whom seemed sometimes nei- ther very clear nor even important. Every so often, the clever, elegantly costumed Jesuits would troop on and then troop off-to be forgotten in the march of partly authentic and partly fabricated Japanese history until they were summoned once again into their robes. Lady Mariko was now a ma- jor character-she, too, being elegant- ly costumed-with scant mention of Blackthorne's wife at home, and thus scant sense of his betrayal, and, indeed, with Blackthorne and Mariko's ro- mance having the aspect less of an Englishman's "going native" than of a romantic interlude between Ð' Arta- gnan and Milady de Winter. On NBC's "Shogun," virtually everyone was ele- gantly costumed, the exception being Blackthorne's crew, who were pictur- esquely folkish during the few mo- ments that they appeared. Where the novel had concentrated, in its crude and boyishly clever way, on pain and cruelty and perpetual head-Ioppings, television's "Shogun" became an epic of elaborate and expensive wardrobe changes. In many ways, the production was quite beautiful. Rarely in a television series-even in such an ambitious one as "Roots"-has there been a compa- rable amplitude of graceful cinematog- raphy. This is not to say that new vi- sual ground was broken in "Shogun" but that TV's normally skimpy visual menu of monotonous long shots, Ping- Pong close ups, and haphazard compo- sition was here sumptuously expanded to include a whole variety of cleverly conceived panoramas, over heads, su b- tIe tracking shots, and well-punctuated